Traditional three-dimensional (3D) chemical shift imaging applies phase encodes in three k-space dimensions, and does not allow a flexible tradeoff between scan time and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). An alternative is to use time varying gradients during the readout of a spectroscopic acquisition that allow data to be sampled for three spatial dimensions in the same time as it takes to acquire a single image in a conventional study. Methods We studied two methods to collect volumetric spectroscopic data with time-varying gradients. The first method applied an oscillating gradient to encode the slice selection direction in combination with phase encodes for the two in-plane dimensions. The second method provided more flexible tradeoffs for time and resolution by using time-varying gradients on two axes to encode the in-plane directions and the slice selection direction and to cover the sampled volume faster, and can thus be averaged several times to reduce motion artifacts. The extra averages can also be used to acquire additional interleaves that increase the field of view in any desired dimension. We conducted in vivo experiments on a 1.5 T GE Signa magnet with shielded gradients. Methods 1 and 2 were used for acquisition with a spin-echo excitation sequence combined with inversion recovery (TE=144 ms, TI=l7Oms, TR=2 s). Results and Discussion Time-varying gradients successfully provided a way to flexibly trade off acquisition time and resolution. The non-uniformly sampled data can be reconstructed with the help of a gridding algorithm.